The Oldest Decalogue

A Manhattan church--All Souls Unitarian--announced last week that it had acquired a new and unique section of the Dead Sea Scrolls: the oldest complete Biblical copy of the Ten Commandments, probably dating from the end of the 1st century B.C. The price of the scroll, slightly more than $5,000, was paid by a prominent mining tycoon with a hankering for archaeology and a strong dislike of publicity. In the course of two lectures at All Souls last spring, Dr. Frank M. Cross Jr., Harvard's Hancock professor of Semitic languages and a leading member of the international team of scroll scholars that has been purchasing, patching and puzzling out the secrets of the scrolls since the Bedouins, first began to bring them in (TIME, April 15, 1957), told his audience that there were still fragments to be bought. The mining executive agreed to put up the money for what he assumed would be little more than bits and pieces.

High-Class Haggling. But Dr. Cross had bigger game in mind. Earlier in the year, while dickering for fragments on behalf of Chicago's McCormick Theological Seminary with the Syrian cobbler Kando, who is unofficial middleman between the Bedouins and the scholars, Cross and his fellow scholars had been offered an exceptionally large piece from Cave 4 for $12,000. An old hand at the Bedouin bargaining table, the scholars began making counteroffers. Finally, last summer, during the height of the Middle East crisis, Cross and Jordanian Curator Yusuf Saad of the Palestine Archaeological Museum sat down with Kando for a bit of high-class haggling over tea and Turkish cigarettes.

Cross could tell from straightening out a piece of the tightly rolled leather that it must be a text from Deuteronomy. The bargaining went on for three sessions, and the price slowly descended to about $5,000. Then Cross and Saad hurried into the British Bank of the Middle East, just outside Jerusalem's ancient Damascus Gate, stepped nervously out again into the teeming, clanking tangle of Arabs and animals in Jericho Road with $5,000 in Jordanian pounds, and hurried back for the final transaction.

"I immediately thrust the roll into the humidifier," said Cross last week. "It rolled out beautifully and required little cleaning and no patching. It's certainly the largest single piece we've gotten from Cave 4, and it's just magnificent."

Scholarly Glory. All Souls Unitarians will have to travel to Jerusalem to see their acquisition as Jordanian law prohibits any cave finds from being taken out of the country. But the church will have its share of scholarly glory; the new scroll will henceforth be known in bibliographies as the "All Souls Deuteronomy."

The haul of some 400 manuscripts from Cave 4 is now considered complete. Scrollsters are currently feverish with anticipation about the contents of Cave 11. Says Cross: "The scrolls from Cave 11 are absolutely complete and intact. One, the Psalms, will probably prove to be the first or second best of all the material that's been found--perhaps better even than the Isaiah. The Bedouins still have an unknown amount of material. When we can find the money or the donors, we'll be able to get at it."

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